'Post-traumatic stress disorder is higher in drone operators'

Aviation expert and former RAF man Peter Gray speaks about the dark side of
modern warfare

Drone operators – the pilots who go to war by "remote control", often experiencing combat thousands of miles away from their targets – might not conform to the traditional image of the battle-weary warrior, but they can suffer higher levels of post-traumatic stress disorder than many conventional bomber crew members, according to the aviation expert Peter Gray.

The Birmingham University lecturer, who began his career as a navigator in the Royal Air Force before moving into academia, was speaking at the Hay Festival, during a discussion chaired by the Telegraph's Defence Editor Con Coughlin.

"What does a drone pilot look like?" Gray asked. "The image, the perception, is that it's somebody in a Portakabin, in an airforce base in the United States, who sees nothing of the enemy, is totally safe, and after an eight or 10-hour shift goes home to his wife and family. Does he still hold that 'warrior' status?"

"It's interesting when you talk to some of the people who are doing this kind of thing. It's interesting when you start getting statistics that show that post-traumatic stress disorder is higher in drone operators than it is in many aircrew."

"They follow the pattern of life in a target environment, and they get so used to that, living day in, day out with these people, that when an attack has to be made, they feel it every bit as much as a pilot of a fast jet who just drops the bomb."

Earlier this year, the emotional strain and dehumanising effects of working as a drone pilot were put under scrutiny by Andrew Niccol's film Good Kill, which starred Ethan Hawke as Major Thomas Egan, a pilot who operates drones in Afghanistan via a military base just outside Las Vegas.

An image of a Reaper drone at an airbase in Nevada (Getty)

In the film, in scenes that directly echo Gray's words, Egan views a live video feed of his victims, spending time watching them go about their daily lives, before launching a deadly attack. He eventually suffers a mental breakdown.

The detached nature of drone warfare has led to concerns about the increasingly automated nature of modern military aviation. But Gray reminded his audience that: "everything we do is automated to an extent – certainly in the aviation world."

"Everytime your holiday jet lands, the chances are that it's using an automatic approach; that the autopilot has done this, this and this," he added.

Drones right now, Gray told his audience, are in no way "fully autonomous": they can't decide when to take off, or choose their own targets. But things could, in theory, develop in that direction.

"Artificial intelligence? How close are we to that? Who knows? I'm certainly not in that game," Gray said. "But that's the level of autonomy that we're talking about, and that's part of the debate that you very rarely hear."

"For the last 130 years, aviation, flight, air power and air warfare have been a catalyst for the development of new technology and industry. In the quest for fully autonomous drones, if that's where the future of warfare is heading, you might be in a position where that request drives the demand for further research into artificial intelligence."

A longer piece on Peter Gray's talk at the Hay Festival, by Con Coughlin, will appear in The Sunday Telegraph on 31st May, 2015